Past News Releases

Ancestor.us.org has updated their billing software to fix a technical problem that led to incidences of incorrect customer charges, company officials said yesterday.

“The problem affected a very limited number of our customers, but even one wrongly billed customer is too many,” a company representative said. “The problem was caused by software provided by a third-party vendor, and we have made sure that they have patched the glitch so it won't happen again.”

The company first became aware of the glitch several weeks ago when they received several similar complaints on their customer service line, the representative said.

“It took us a little while to figure out exactly what the problem was,” he said. “At first we thought that people might have simply been confused about our billing plan. But looking into the matter more deeply, we discovered that there was in fact a billing problem that was technical in nature.”

The company said they have offered full refunds to every customer who was affected by the glitch.

“We are not happy this happened, but we are happy we were able to quickly fix it,” he said.

Before the new patch was launched, the company beta tested it in real-world simulated conditions to make sure that it will not recur, the company said.

“We had to make sure that we would not end up in this kind of situation again,” the representative said. “Online companies have to rely on software for billing, and we have to make sure that software is reliable.”

About Ancestor.us.org:

Ancestor.us.org can be used to find ancestors, funeral records, birth records, and more. View photos, family trees, military records, adoptions and obituaries on the website in order to piece a family history together.